Please get an active carbon filter for your air inlet. They’re not expensive and most cars only have the pollen filter version.
We found very high pollution values inside cars which in hindsight is very much not surprising due to what you noticed. A carbon filter brings it way down.
Yep. This is low hanging fruit for making constituents happy. I emailed my city councilor about this because I couldn't figure out who to ask at public works. The next morning a work truck rolled up and installed a shield on the light nearest to my house.
One of the best room I ever had was in Norway. It was at most 3 times as large as the queensized bed, had at least 5 different lighting options and a fantastic black-out curtain (this was needed above the Arctic circle) and tons of small storage places and hooks - and this includes a tiny bathroom. Everything you need, and super cozy.
The amount of shifty money practices I've seen so far is astonishing, all in the pursuit of more science per proposal. Ideally you use some of the funding from the previous project to do some exploratory research somewhere very different and then write up a proposal around it, but since you already did some of the work there'll be money for more research and instruments and things and maybe fun ideas that students have.. creative accounting all around. I'd be appalled if it wasn't in the name of science.
I think many people do that - it's very hard to write up a compelling proposal without having spent some time working on the idea to see if it's viable, but there's often no funded way to do preliminary work on an idea. If you don't do something like what you describe, it's nearly impossible to branch into new areas, and that makes it nearly impossible to do good research. This is another problem with funding project proposals.
But what I was describing was slightly different - once the proposal is funded, many PIs feel compelled to deliver what they said they would, whereas in the two years since you wrote the proposal, the world has moved on, you've learned things, both from your early work on the project and from others, and more promising avenues are now possible. If you feel compelled by the funder to continue in the original direction, you'll very rarely deliver good research.
You shouldn't be appalled: grants that force you to work on a precise area with no flexibility are what's appalling. Research just doesn't work like that! The current grant proposal process is the creation of administrators and politicians, not scientists.
Many of the most critical research results came out of some random hallway conversation, as a response to some new result that didn't exist when the research plan was formulated, or because someone had a brain fart. If at each point someone had put up their hand and said "sorry, scientist, that's not on your current grant roadmap" we'd probably still be dying of preventable diseases and lighting our homes with gas fixtures.
